LINO CAMPRUBI ´ * Birds Without Borders: Ecological Diplomacy and the WWF in Franco’s Spain ABSTRACT The Spanish Don ˜ ana Biological Station, inaugurated in 1964, poses two historio- graphical puzzles. First, it was the first large project of the World Wildlife Fund, which is usually seen as a response to the very specific post-imperial challenges of African parks. Second, it was the first non-alpine park in Spain, and although it was designed and inaugurated in the midst of Francisco Franco’s nationalist dictatorship, it was an explicitly transnational project. This paper approaches Don ˜ ana’s unique story through the concept of ecological diplomacy. It points to the diplomatic strategies mobilized by a small group of ecologists with managerial and financial skills. Promoting Don ˜ ana, British ornithologists presented it as an African wilderness, which created tensions with Spanish ecologists, themselves colonial scientists. Ecological diplomacy, more- over, refers to a characteristic period between conservation diplomacy and environ- mental diplomacy. In it, conservation was understood as the top-down management of foreign territories for research purposes. While this can be partly understood as the globalization of the Swiss model for conservation, it arrived in Spain through the mediation of the French Tour du Valat station and of English ecology. Finally, stressing the ecological dimension of this type of conservation diplomacy helps in *Lino Camprub´ ı, Universidad de Sevilla, Departamento de Filosof´ ıa y L´ ogica, Camilo Jos´ e Cela s/n, 41018, Sevilla, Spain; lcamprubi@us.es The following abbreviations are used: ADENA, Asociaci´ on para la Defensa de la Naturaleza [Association for the Defense of Nature] (WWF in Spain); CSIC, Consejo Superior de In- vestigaciones Cient´ ıficas [Spanish National Research Council], Madrid; EBD, Estaci´ on Biol´ ogica de Don ˜ana [Don ˜ana Biological Station], Seville, Spain; IBP, International Biological Program; ICONA, Instituto para la Conservaci´ on de la Naturaleza [Institute for the Conservation of Nature], Spain; IUCN, International Union for the Conservation of Nature, Gland, Switzerland; NP, Max Nicholson’s Papers, Woodson Research Center, Fondren Library, Rice University, Houston, Texas, USA, https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/ricewrc/00224/00224-P.html; UN, United Nations; UNESCO, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; WWF, World Wildlife Fund. | 433 Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Vol. 50, Number 4, pps. 433–455. ISSN 1939-1811, electronic ISSN 1939-182X.  2020 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www. ucpress.edu/journals/reprints-permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/hsns.2020.50.4.433.